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'Up to now it might be helpful but it is not an evidence based approach'. That is quite an interesting admission from one of the German doctors!

I don't know Vernadsky. My view is very close to Leibniz. Leibniz believes that all universes are possible, and indeed exist, but that by definition our world is one in which there is life and knowledge. That has to be so because in a world without life and knowledge we would not be having this...

which page was that? @Cinders66

No, David is not putting experience outside physics and nor am I. And, as I said, getting clear the difference between experience and dynamic causal relations (wha you call stuff) is the starting point. It isn't hard if as a scientists you have been aware of it for decades. But you can never get...

I know there are lots of people who do not see the question because they do not see that the quale of red is a completely different category from the red it represents. There are lots of eliminativists around. But my position is diametrically opposite to that. I have no problem formulating the...

No, it is just that I can see from behind the gate that the path ahead is just a trompe l'oeil. There cannot be a hard problem of how sensations arise from matter if matter is defined as that which gives rise to sensations. It is interesting to read an ordinary dictionary. Physical stuff is...

I would say there is nothing simpler than consciousness. It is just what it is like to be on the left hand side of a physics equation. But there is certainly something different about the way to find out its rules of correspondence with dynamics from the dynamics of bile. Perhaps we have to...

That has not been my experience. The success I have had has been because I insisted on asking the most fundamental questions relevant to the problem!

No Mike Hausser has no interest in consciousness, that is the point. He is at the forefront of cell-level analysis of how neurons compute. We actually know a huge amount about how neurons interact and thanks to people like Mike, the fine detail biophysics. But the people doing the research...

I think I might have held this view in my forties. I cannot really remember. You are expressing the view of people like Christof Koch, at least until recently, and the Patricia and Paul Churchland, I think. The problem is that neuroscientists are completely stuck precisely because they have not...

I am just saying that forming a thought is physical interaction, but that we do not know which physical interactions correspond to which thoughts. I am not suggesting a new primordial force like David Chalmers. That is a category mistake - effectively looking for thoughts on the right hand side...

OK, but if that is your view of consciousness it does not relate to the topic of this thread introduced by boolybooly, which was 'the body mind duality at a philosphical level'. If all you mean is brain function then I quite agree that it is nothing special in comparison to insulin production...

The psychology of this is probably quite complex. One can reasonably presume (in the way that psychologists tend to) that subconscious factors, transference, peer pressure and that other word I can never remember are deeply involved. It may not be so much hierarchy as conflicted emotions...

Origin late 17th century: apparently a variant of dialect knub ‘protuberance’, from Middle Low German knubbe, knobbe ‘knob’.

This is the nub. (Whatever a nub is.)

Well if it brought back bath salts there must be life on Mars.

You don't need to look for rocks. Everything is action, so the universe rocks. :cookie::eek::cookie:

No it isn't you. It's them.

Yes, I pretty much agree with all that. I had an interesting conversation not long ago with Vittorio Gallese, who was one of the people who identified 'mirror neurons'. Gale's view has changed since in the sense of coming to think that 'mirroring' is a much more general property of...

Correct. My mother is in that situation. Except that rather than taking gibberish in the sense of incoherence she talks in the most wonderful irrelevant riddles and fantasies. She does not recognise anyone much but she puts each of us into a confabulated role. I don't see her as any less...